A Fatal Facade


Book Description

A FATAL FACADE is a crime thriller focusing on the lives of four people who become involved with Paolo Cellini, a 30-year-old wealthy art dealer who is killed in his marbled bathroom in Chelsea, London. Each person is linked to Cellini in unusual ways: his lover, Bianca Vella, a Maltese nightclub-singer who worships him; Rico Batas, his Filipino nightclub-manager who hates him; his other lover, Angelica Logan, a woman with too many terrible secrets and Jack Bradley, an ex-DCI, who needs to redeem himself to his family and his colleagues by discovering the truth about the life and death of Cellini. Jack’s obsessive search takes him down dark, disturbing avenues into the secret lives of these people who are almost crushed under the weight of Cellini’s narcissistic personality. Jack knows that one of them killed him but even he is stunned by the secrets he unearths. The novel explores the universal themes of human frailty and our need to find forgiveness. For what man or woman can honestly say ‘I have never done anything wrong.’ ,




The Façade


Book Description

Sci-fi meets historical fact in this thrilling novel by ancient-language scholar Michael S. Heiser. Haunted by his parents' death and his career failures, Dr. Brian Scott has begun to settle for the life he's been given. Until he's kidnapped by military insiders known as The Group. Disappearances. Visitations. Murder. Brian and a team of world-class scholars are given a confidential mission: To prepare humanity for a new reality. They are here. But as the government's involvement with extraterrestrials is revealed, strange things begin to happen. Something isn't right. Unpeeling layer after layer of deception and counter-deception, Brian moves toward a shocking revelation that will forever alter how humanity sees itself. Every document cited in The Façade actually exists. Every ancient text discussed in The Façade is authentic. Every historical figure referred to or quoted in The Façade is real.




Behind the Facade


Book Description

Explores why authoritarian regimes bother to hold elections. Behind the Façade examines the question of why authoritarian regimes in Southeast Asia bother holding elections. Using comprehensive case studies of Cambodia, Myanmar, and Singapore, Lee Morgenbesser argues that elections allow authoritarian regimes to collect information, pursue legitimacy, manage political elites, and sustain neopatrimonial domination. He demonstrates how these functions are employed to manage the complex strategic interaction that occurs between dictators, political elites, and citizens. Far from being mere window dressing or even a precursor to democracy, flawed elections, Morgenbesser concludes, are paramount to the maintenance of authoritarian rule.




The Chesterian


Book Description




Reading the Reverse Façade of Reims Cathedral


Book Description

Reading the Reverse Façade of Reims Cathedral bestows long overdue scholarly attention on the magnificent sculptural program of the reverse façade at Reims Cathedral, the coronation cathedral of French kings. Donna Sadler reveals how the imagery on the reverse façade not only conforms to a system of memory and mode of medieval narratology, but also articulates a dominant ideological position regarding the interdependence of ecclesiastical and royal powers.




In Search of China's Development Model


Book Description

This book examines the development model that has driven China's economic success and looks at how it differs from the Washington Consensus. China’s Development Model (CDM) is examined with a view to answering a central question: given China’s peculiar matrix of a socialist party-state juxtaposed with economic internationalization and marketization, what are the underlying dynamics and the distinctive features of the economic and political/legal/social dimensions of the CDM, and how do we properly characterize their interrelations? The chapters further analyse to what extent and under what circumstances is China's development model sustainable, and to what degree is it readily applicable to other developing countries. Based on their findings in this volume, the authors conclude that the defining feature of the CDM’s economic dimension is "Janus-faced state-led growth," and the political/legal/social dimension of the CDM is best characterized as "adaptive post-totalitarianism." The contributors illustrate that the CDM’s parameters are shown to be much less sustainable than the CDM’s outcome in developmental performance and the extent to which the CDM can be applied to other late-developers is subject to more qualifications than its sustainability.










The Seven Basic Plots


Book Description

"This book at last provides a comprehensive answer to the age-old riddle of whether there are only a small number of 'basic stories' in the world. Using a wealth of examples, from ancient myths and folk tales, via the plays and novels of great literature to the popular movies and TV soap operas of today, it shows that there are seven archetypal themes which recur throughout every kind of storytelling." "But this is only the prelude to an investigation into how and why we are 'programmed' to imagine stories in these ways, and how they relate to the inmost patterns of human psychology. Drawing on a vast array of examples, from Proust to detective stories, from the Marquis de Sade to E.T., Christopher Booker then leads us through the extraordinary changes in the nature of storytelling over the past 200 years, and why so many stories have 'lost the plot' by losing touch with their underlying archetypal purpose."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved




The Dramatist and the Received Idea


Book Description

Dr Sanders' book grew out of uneasiness over commonly accepted ways of talking about Elizabethan literature. Phrases like 'world picture', 'received ideas' are so easily used that we bypass important questions: A picture of whose word? Ideas received by whom? and in what way? The heart of Dr Sanders' book is a critical account of seven plays by Marlowe and Shakespeare (The Massacre at Paris, The Jew of Malta, Edward II, Dr Faustus, Richard II, Richard III and Macbeth). In his examination, Dr Sanders is at pains to analyse the nature of the intellectual and cultural environment in which the plays were written, to define the ways in which this environment influenced Marlowe and Shakespeare and thus to come to a full understanding of the manner in which a work of art can be simultaneously 'of an age' and 'for all time'.